Nate rose to blog prominence, or “bloginence,” for his startling accurate predictions of the 2008 election on FiveThirtyEight (538 is the number of electors in the US electoral college). Having conquered baseball prediction models and election polling, Nate has set his sights climate change. He issued a bold and brilliant challenge to climate change skeptics this summer:

The rules of the challenge are as follows:

1. For each day that the high temperature in your hometown is at least 1 degree Fahrenheit above average, as listed by Weather Underground, you owe me $25. For each day that it is at least 1 degree Fahrenheit below average, I owe you $25.
2. The challenge proceeds in monthly intervals, with the first month being August. At the end of each month, we’ll tally up the winning and losing days and the loser writes the winner a check for the balance.
3. The challenge automatically rolls over to the next month until/unless: (i) one party informs the other by the 20th of the previous month that he would like to discontinue the challenge (that is, if you want to discontinue the challenge for September, you’d have to tell me this by August 20th), or (ii) the losing party has failed to pay the winning party in a timely fashion, in which case the challenge may be canceled at the sole discretion of the winning party.

I don’t know if he did have any takers.

Nate isn’t only sticking to the numbers with his Copenhagen coverage. His posts are more personal and try to make sense of the complex policy machine behind a global treaty conference. Nate’s success was due to his ability to skillfully turn complex data into comprehensible models. He would take the competing polls and mountains of data and simply say, “Here’s who is going to win, and this is why.” Time Magazine put it this way when they declared Nate one of the Time 100 — 100 people who most affect our world:

The point is not how precisely he calls the results but that after reading his analysis, you actually know something you didn’t know when you started. In a world choking on retreaded arguments long worn bald of the facts, this type of analysis has proved to be stunningly — and reassuringly — popular.

This type of clear and calm analysis is needed as tensions rise and polluters try to muddy the clear water climate science. However, Nate isn’t just crunching temperature and emissions data, his posts from Copenhagen give a clear first-person account of the emotion and complexity surrounding the negotiations.